In collaboration with Wolf Humanities Center at Penn

Documenting Nuclear Afterlives: A Conversation with Three Film Directors

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Join us for extended excerpts, chosen by the directors themselves, from these recent documentaries about people living in unwanted intimacy with nuclear reactors and radiation in different parts of the world. Some of these reactors, like the one in Fukushima have witnessed an absolute nuclear fallout while the power plant in Three Mile Island experienced a partial meltdown. Communities in the tsunami affected coastline of Southern India are protesting the construction of Russian technology based atomic power plants because they anticipate Fukushima, they speculate an about-to-come Chernobyl.

After the screening, the directors will discuss their work and the troubled histories and afterlives of nuclear power plants with professors Siyen Fei (Penn History), Rahul Mukherjee (Penn Cinema and Media), and Noriko Manabe (Temple Music).

SAFSTOR (dir. Adam Diller, 2016)

This experimental ethnographic short film contrasts the physical presence of the Three Mile Island power plant with the memories of local residents of the partial meltdown in 1979.

Nuclear Hallucinations (dir. Fathima Nizaruddin, 2016)

Satirical impersonations, performance and ironic renderings of jingoistic rhetoric work together to form a narrative that explores the tragic absurdity of constructing nuclear power plants in Koodankulam, a place on a tsunami affected coast of South India.

Furusato (dir. Thorsten Trimpop, 2016)

A teen rocker, a media-savvy activist, a conflicted TEPCO engineer, and a female horse breeder cope with the loss of their homes and the unseen danger of radiation in Fukushima’s exclusion zone.

Organized by Rahul Mukherjee and Siyen Fei. Cosponsored by Wolf Humanities Center, Cinema and Media Studies Program, South Asia Center, Penn Program in Environmental Humanities, Center for East Asian Studies, and Lauder Institute.